From Goldman Sachs today: We have lowered our forecast for US real GDP growth further and now expect real GDP to grow just 2%-2½% through the end of 2012. Our forecast for annual average GDP growth has fallen to 1.7% in 2011 (from 1.8%) and to 2.1% in 2012 (from 3.0%). Since this pace is slightly below the US economy’s potential, we now expect the unemployment rate to be at 9¼% by the end of 2012, slightly above the current level.

2. Even our new forecast is subject to meaningful downside risk. We now see a one-in-three risk of renewed recession, mostly concentrated in the next 6-9 months. There are three specific issues that concern us. First, a worsening of the European financial crisis, and a failure of European policymakers to respond adequately, could lead to a further tightening of financial conditions and credit availability, which would worsen the economic outlook globally. Second, our forecast assumes that the payroll tax cut—currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2011—is extended for another year, but if that failed to happen the fiscal drag in early 2012 would increase significantly. Third, increases in the US unemployment rate have historically had a tendency to feed on themselves, and this could happen again.

Pethokoukis makes this comparison to the 1980 & 1984 elections:

The consensus used to be that President Obama might be OK if the jobless rate fell below 8 percent by Election Day. That seems increasingly unlikely. The economy is, at best, in slow-growth mode, just churning and churning, creating few jobs. Comparisons to President Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign are looking ever-more ridiculous. Under Reagan’s tax-cut driven recovery, unemployment fell from 10.8 percent in December 1982 to 7.2 percent by Election Day as the economy grew 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984. In fact, Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign might be the better comparison. The unemployment rate jumped from 6.0 percent in December 1979 to 7.5 percent on Election Day 1980 as the economy shrank 0.3 percent.

All I know is that outside of the 4% unemployment rate of the DC Beltway, it is more like Mourning In America under the Obama regime.

In one of the most awkward and vapid performances I can remember his having given, Pres. Barack Obama yesterday made it clear that he has learned absolutely nothing from the debt-ceiling debate — that he may be incapable of learning. He continued to talk nonsense about government “investing” in this, that, and the other, and said that was how the nation creates jobs. It was a self-discrediting performance.

Emphasis added. (Via Instapundit.) Williamson also details how he would balance the budget.

Even after his $800 billion stimulus failed to generate the promised employment numbers, the president still thinks we should be spending more money to jumpstart the economy . He sounds like a man who, after maxing out his credit cards, ask Visa to raise his credit limit so he can spend a little more to get his life in order.

Um, Mr. President, weren’t you paying attention during the recent debate? We don’t have the money to fund your new schemes — or any new schemes for that matter.

Guess he’ll be using this tour to tell us how he plans to create more jobs. If he’s doing any talking about job creation, he should be addressing his words not to citizens of battlegrounds states, but to his appointees in the federal bureaucracy, instructing them to rescind the burdensome regulations they authorized in the past thirty months — and to find new ways to streamline the “permitting process.”

But, I daresay instead of offering new ideas on job creation, he’ll pull a page from his campaign playbook and attack Republicans, likely blaming the last Republican president for the mess he inherited.

With a new executive at the helm of “Equality California” (EqCA) we at GayPatriot have hoped (indeed still hope) that the largest gay and lesbian organization in the Golden State will become less partisan than it has been in the past and less prejudiced against Republicans.

Despite the organization’s statist ideology, seeking a legislative solution to problems facing gay and lesbian citizens, and its alliances with a variety of interest groups allied close to the state Democratic Party, including public employee unions, the organization’s new executive director, Roland Palenica, told San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter that his group “represent[s] all LGBT Californians, whether they donate to us or not“.

No, Roland, no you don’t. You don’t speak for the gay Republicans who bristle at EqCA’s alliance with state Democrats. You don’t speak for gay libertarians who bristle at the statist “equality” ideology. And you don’t even speak for all gay leftists who bristle as your alliance with corporate lobbyists.

My email invitation to the town hall meeting where the gay community was allowed to vote on permitting EQCA to speak for every one of us must have been sent to the wrong addy. When did we all get a say about EQCA being the entire community’s rep? Of course, we didn’t, just as we don’t see them holding regular public forums.

Recall EQCA’s board failed to organize any open sessions about the EDposition before Palencia was hired. . . .

EQCA does not represent me, and quite a few other LGBT people in California. We have major issues with the group and the elitists running it. . . .

And EqCA does not represent me either — and I would daresay the overwhelming majority of GayPatriot readers living in the Golden State.